Tech —

The new Mac Pro—you can’t buy it yet, but you can look

Gallery: Two years in the making, Mac Pro gets a major redesign.

For the first time in years, Mac Pro fans have something to really cheer about. Apple today unveiled a redesign of its workhorse computer, which is now a reflective cylindrical case that's only 1/8 the volume of the current Mac Pro. Apple vaguely said that the new computer won't go on sale until "later this year," but it's never too early to take a look at a device that we will put through its paces as soon as it's available.

Don't you just want to grab it?

Clint Ecker

The Mac Pro drew a huge crowd at WWDC, but the Ars crew still got a close-up look.

Clint Ecker

The Mac Pro's devoted fan base from another angle.

Jacqui Cheng

It... kind of looks like a garbage can?

Apple

The shell comes off to display all the glorious innards.

Apple

Up to 12 cores worth of Intel Xeon E5 chips, 40GBps PCI Express bandwidth, and "256-bit-wide floating point instructions" make this one fast Mac Pro.

Apple

A four-channel DDR3 memory controller runs at 1866MHz, delivering up to 60GBps of memory bandwidth—twice as high as the previous Mac Pro.

Apple

Two AMD FirePro GPUs with 6GB of dedicated VRAM each help support up to three 4K displays. GPU performance was bumped from 2.7 to 7 teraflops.

Instead of multiple heat sinks and fans, heat is conducted away from the CPUs and GPUs and distributed across a "unified thermal core." That means " if one processor isn’t working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them," Apple says.

Apple

Instead of multiple fans, a single fan pulls air upward through a vent in the bottom.

Apple

The Mac Pro has expandability, with Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 ports. Here, the ports illuminate when the chassis is spun around (thanks to a motion sensor).

Apple

A WWDC keynote slide shows just how much the Mac Pro design changed since the last version in 2010.

Clint Ecker

Here's a better look at what a Mac Pro looked like in 2008. Will you be buying a new one?